Author: Mathew Ingram

Last week, executives from some of the world’s largest social platforms—Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X, formerly known as Twitter—testified at a Senate hearing about children’s safety online. The session featured the sort of grandstanding by senators that often occurs in such hearings, including a bizarre detour into whether Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok (which is based in China), is a member of the Chinese Communist Party (even though he is from Singapore). One particularly striking moment came after Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, asked Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, to apologize to some of the families present at the hearing, including Maurine Molak, whose son David died by suicide at sixteen after he was cyberbullied, and Todd and Mia Minor, whose son Matthew died at twelve after he took part in an online “blackout challenge.” Zuckerberg complied. “No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered,” he said.

Parents in the viewers’ gallery, including Molak and the Minors, weren’t just there for an apology from Zuckerberg or the other executives, but to pressure legislators to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a law that, according to its supporters, could help prevent the kinds of dangers that their children were exposed to. Molak told NBC News that she and other parents are up against a “billion-dollar lobby campaign” funded by the tech platforms and aimed at blocking the legislation. She added that she and the other parents in attendance are “sick and tired of [tech platforms] deploying all of these people to crush the work that we’re doing.”

KOSA was first proposed in 2022 by Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee. Blumenthal has said that he was inspired to craft the legislation after Frances Haugen—a former Facebook staffer turned whistleblower, whose disclosures from inside the company were widely covered by numerous major news outlets in 2021—appeared before Congress that year. As part of her testimony, Haugen submitted internal documents that appeared to show that bosses at Meta knew that Facebook and Instagram were harming teenagers, by encouraging emotionally or physically harmful behavior, but had taken little or no action to prevent by way of mitigation. Blumenthal said that KOSA was necessary because Haugen had showed that Facebook knowingly “exploited teens using powerful algorithms that amplified their insecurities.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Legislators continue to push Kids Online Safety Act despite ongoing criticism”

From Alec Marsh for Outside magazine: “On September 5 of 1936, a pair of fisherman came across a woman floundering her way through a bog on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia. In the background was her single-engined Percival Vega Gull aircraft, its nose buried deep in the moss. Blood streamed down the woman’s face and black peat went up to the waist of her formerly white overalls: ‘I’m Mrs Markham,’ she told them. ‘I’ve just flown from England.’ Taken to a local farmhouse, the aviator asked for a cup of tea and for a phone. She was directed to ‘a little cubicle that housed an ancient telephone’ built on the rocks, ‘put there in case of shipwrecks,’ she recalled. Over the line she told the operator: ‘Could you ask someone to send a taxi for me?’ Beryl Markham, 33, had just become the first person to fly non-stop, solo, from Europe to North America.”

The Donner party might have survived if they hadn’t rejected help from indigenous tribes

From Julie Schablitsky for Archeology Archive: “Until now the Native American perspective has been left out of the telling of the Donner tragedy, not because the wel mel ti did not remember the pioneers, but because they were never asked, or perhaps were not ready to share. Their oral tradition recalls the starving strangers who camped in an area that was unsuitable for that time of year. Taking pity on the pioneers, the northern Washoe attempted to feed them, leaving rabbit meat and wild potatoes near the camps. Another account states that they tried to bring the Donner Party a deer carcass, but were shot at as they approached. Later, some wel mel ti observed the migrants eating human remains. Fearing for their lives, the area’s native inhabitants continued to watch the strangers but avoided further contact. The migrants at Alder Creek were not surviving in the mountains alone—the northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She made history with a hair-raising flight across the Atlantic”

From Mark Thiessen for AP: “A woman with a lengthy criminal history including theft, assault and prostitution got into a truck with a man who had picked her up for a “date” near downtown Anchorage. When he left her alone in the vehicle, she stole a digital memory card from the center console. Now, more than four years later, what she found on that card is key to a double murder trial set to begin this week: gruesome photos and videos of a woman being beaten and strangled at a Marriott hotel, her attacker speaking in a strong accent as he urged her to die, her blanket-covered body being snuck outside on a luggage cart. Smith has pleaded not guilty to 14 charges in the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February 2019.”

An African-American man named Osbourn Dorsey invented the doorknob in the 1800s

From Same Passage: “Osbourn Dorsey invented the doorknob and doorstop in December of 1878. He successfully obtained a patent for his work in the same year. Because of the time in which he lived and the fact that he was African-American, very little is known about his life. Historians still wonder if the man was born free or if he was a freed slave, and they don’t really know where Dorsey lived or what other inventions he created if any, or even what he did for a living. Most of the information about him and his inventions comes from his patent application. Before Dorsey’s invention people closed and secured doors in a variety of ways. Many people used some type of latch to keep doors closed, whereas others used leather straps as handles. Even after the doorknob was invented it took years for people to embrace them fully and begin installing them.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She stole a man’s memory card and discovered a serial killer”

From Jack Dolan at the LA Times: “Dangling from a thin rope thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley last October, Zuko Carrasco could feel his arms tremble. A paraplegic who had lost the use of his legs eight years earlier in a bizarre accident — a trust fall gone awry — he had spent a week ascending El Capitan, the world’s most famous big wall rock climb, one tiny pull-up at a time. A “good pull” moved him up about 4 inches. He would need to perform something like 9,000 of them to reach the summit. Along the way, he suffered dehydration, searing blisters and, at times, soul-crushing doubt. He shivered in the early morning and baked in the midday sun. That was the worst because the injury that paralyzed him from the waist down also prevented him from sweating properly, adding heatstroke to the long list of mortal dangers he had to contend with.”

Unravelling the mystery behind a tiny village at the center of a giant crater on Madagascar

From Vox, via Kottke: “Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction. When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there? And what did life look like in such a strange geography? To find out, we teamed up with a local team in Madagascar and fell down a rabbit hole of geology and mapping along the way. It’s a story of how continental shifts and volcanic geology came together to form a place for a group of people to call home.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A paralyzed man made it up El Capitan using only his arms”

From Emmie Goldberg for the NYT: “There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another. The two spoke at least once a week, and sometimes multiple times a day. Mostly, they talked over the phone, and provided recordings of these conversations to The Times. Sometimes it was in person, in the prison’s fluorescently lit visitor room, over bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

She set a new record by spending five hundred days alone in a cave

From D.T. Max for The New Yorker: “In 2021, just after lockdowns in Spain ended, Flamini thought about coming down from the mountains. But her real desire was to go somewhere more remote: the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia. Only one European had ever crossed it alone on foot, she’d learned. She moved to northern Spain and began training for the Gobi expedition by hiking steep mountain trails while carrying a backpack weighed down by bottles filled with water. She soon decided that she was prepared physically but not mentally. Flamini thought about test runs that might prepare her for the solitude of the Mongolian desert. Spending time in a cave, she decided, could provide useful lessons.” 

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “An atheist chaplain and a death row inmate”

Last week, fake pornographic images of singer Taylor Swift started spreading across X (formerly known as Twitter). Swift fans quickly swarmed the platform, calling out the images as fakes generated by AI software, and demanding that X remove them and block the accounts sharing them. According to a number of reports, the platform removed some of the images and the accounts that posted them, but not before certain photos had been viewed millions of times, and images continued to circulate across the service even after the bans were implemented. X then blocked the term “Taylor Swift” from its search engine, so that trying to search for the singer produced an error telling users that “something went wrong.” Despite this attempt to block people from seeing the content, reporters for The Verge found that it was relatively easy to get around the search block and find the fake images anyway.

Some observers noted that X’s inability to stop the proliferation of Swift porn was likely caused in part by Elon Musk’s dismantling of the company’s trust and safety team, most of whom were fired after he acquired Twitter in 2022. In the wake of the Taylor Swift controversy, Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, told Bloomberg that the company is planning a new “trust and safety center of excellence” in Texas to help enforce its content moderation rules, and that X intends to hire a hundred full-time moderators. Bloomberg also noted that the announcement came just days before executives from X and the other major social platforms and services are set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on child safety online.

On Monday, X restored the ability to search for Taylor Swift, but said in a statement that it would “continue to be vigilant” in removing similar AI-generated nonconsensual images. (According to a report from The Verge, some of the original Swift images were seen forty-five million times before they were removed.) The White House even weighed in on the controversy: Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told ABC News that the Biden administration was “alarmed by the reports,” and that while social media companies are entitled to make their own content decisions, the White House believes it has a role in preventing “the spread of misinformation, and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Taylor Swift deepfakes could be just the tip of an AI-generated iceberg”